You’ve got to keep performing to keep going: Tony Christie
Tony Christie: Almost 50 years in the music world. Pic by Sameera Weerasekera
Tony Christie has had a long and colourful career and he’s just added Colombo to the list of places he’s performed in. The singer with over 40 albums and 70 singles, who has performed in many parts of the globe including Australia, Germany, Spain, Singapore and Austria was at the BMICH last night to thrill his local fans. Speaking to the Sunday Times soon after he arrived, he revealed just what keeps him still on the move after almost 50 years in the music world.
“If you retire, you die,” he says, adding that he does in fact know musicians who actually did die upon retirement. He will keep performing because his passion for his work is something which keeps him going.
Tony Christie began his career in the mid 1960s, much before his breakthrough hit ‘Las Vegas’ in 1971. ‘His famous hit ‘I did what I did for Maria’ made it to No. 2 on the UK charts, while ‘Is this the way to Amarillo’ surprisingly only made it to the Top 20 on the charts but became a big hit globally. He moved to Spain and performed in Continental Europe around the early 1990s, but returned to the UK charts in 1999 with ‘Walk like a Panther’ written for him by British musician Jarvis Cocker.
The memories are many, among them an ‘Elvis in the Park’ concert where many famous celebrities (including Tom Jones) performed a song each. Tony himself sang ‘Can’t help falling in love’, and he had one of the most unforgettable moments of his career after the performance. “I was standing backstage with Tom Jones and I feel a tap on my shoulder and I see Priscilla (Elvis Presley’s wife) standing there, and she compliments me on my performance and says ‘That was one of the songs Elvis and I liked the most.’ I was speechless. She then said ‘I’m Priscilla by the way’ and I said ‘Well, yes I know’. I didn’t know what to say,” he recalls fondly.
Tony feels that his hit singles are timeless, which is why they are still famous today – more than four decades after they were released. He explains that the first time his manager heard ‘Amarillo’, he had commented that the ‘Sha-la-la-la’ riff in the song would make the song appealing to audiences, identifying it as a hit instantly. At his shows, Tony is happy to be afforded the chance to explain a bit about each song in order to help the audience understand and appreciate it better, something which he wasn’t able to do earlier in his career when he was a cabaret singer.
Back home to the UK on Monday, he is doing a five week Christmas show in Cambridge. He says he believes in the saying ‘work till you drop’ and he follows it to the letter, so much so that he feels he spends more time at hotels than at home – the worst part of the job for him. But come February 2018, he will be home for his 50th wedding anniversary.
He is unsure though what he will be doing next April when it will be his 75th birthday -“I probably will be working,” he laughs.